Month 1-4 Recap – A Good Start

One major goal when transitioning to Insomnia full-time was to share as much
about the process as possible. As an independent developer with little time,
success heavily relies on the effective use of shared knowledge, tools,
resources, and peers. Without things like blog posts, open source, and friends,
Insomnia would not be where it is today. This post is an attempt to give back.

This is the first post in a series titled
Transparency, where I share numbers and talk about what
I've done, what I'm thinking, and the mistakes I've made. If there is anything
you think that's missing from these posts, feel free to reach out and let me
know. I'll try to accommodate as many requests as possible.

Alright, let's dive in.

User Growth and Other Stats

I'd like to start this post by going over some interesting statistics on how
Insomnia has been doing so far. Since Insomnia is a desktop app, these stats
will be divided into application stats and website stats.

Active App Users

Here is a screenshot from Mixpanel on daily active app
users. I've chosen to define an active user as someone who has sent at least one
API request from the app in a given day.

As you can see, most of the user base can be attributed to being featured on
Hacker News in early September. Since then, retention has been high and growth
has been steady but slow. High retention is good. Slow growth either means I'm
doing a poor job at getting the word out, or the target market is too small.
I have a suspicion it's the former, because similar applications exist with
millions of users.

Website Traffic

In my opinion, one of the biggest mistakes made by independent developers is
not having a proper website. A website is one of the only ways of gaining
users organically (unless you are in an app store), so a website should be a
huge priority.

Here are some website stats taken from
Google Analytics over the same time
period as the one above. Notice the huge spike from Hacker News.

It's harder to see in this graph, but if you ignore the spikes, there is also
a steady growth here. Another good sign.

Miscellaneous Stats

In order to keep this post relatively short, I've condensed the rest of the
stats into tables. If there is anything else you want to see here, just let me
know.

Insomnia currently has no premium features, so has been unable to
generate revenue. However, A beta version of the first paid feature (sync) is
almost complete, and additional team collaboration features are in the works.
This number should be greater than zero in the next post.

Time Allocation, Priorities, and Roadmap

The last four month have been crazy. Full-time work on Insomnia
began on July 5th, and the app launched on
July 24th. Effectively, the last four months
looked like this.

July – Finish development for initial public launch

August – Implement remaining core features (environments, and cookie support)

September – Bug fixes, website, small improvements, and talking to users

October – Research and implement cloud sync features

I don't have the next four months planned out, so I can't tell you exactly what
will happen, but I do have some general goals.

Have sync and team features available for purchase by December

Begin open-sourcing parts of the codebase

Implement highly requested features

Binary file support

Request chaining and/or scripting

More import sources (Postman, Swagger, etc)

Write more content like this

Mistakes and Lessons Learned

Here are the main things that I have learned so far. Each one of these could
probably have a separate blog post written about it.

Wrap Up

Overall, Insomnia is doing well. The user base is growing, the app is becoming
more stable, and the people using it are amazing to interact with.
However, it's not generating revenue yet, and user growth is slow. Considering
the sync beta should be ready to go live this week, the next few weeks should
be very interesting.

I plan to try and write one of these posts every month, so keep your eyes out
for that. Again, if there is anything else that you would like to see included
in these posts, just let me know.